confinement,RELEASE: Freedom
by Sigh of Lethe
Summary: Even immortality doesn't mean you will live forever. Even omnipotence doesn't mean you can overcome every obstacle. Nine fragments of a long life, and a single hope for the future. (second-person POV)


Your Name is Hecate, and you are a Goddess of Earth.

Well, that's not quite right. The King of the Gods himself knelt before you, granting you partial dominion over everything contained within the world. You are the Goddess of Sky, Goddess of Sea, Goddess of the Land Beneath the Soil, and many other things besides.

But that's a mouthful, so you call yourself a Goddess of Earth. It gets the idea across, most of the time.

Yours is not the first generation of gods, and its King is not the first. You know this. You yourself are built from the bones of ancient deities, their glory faded long before your worshipers found them and their dreams gave birth to a goddess mighty enough to shake the heavens.

Is that to be your fate, one day? Will you, too, be forgotten and decay, your remains good only for shaping that which will come after you? The idea discomfits you.

The King of the Gods laughs at the idea, and his Court seems unable to imagine a time when they will not be supreme. They are immortal, they say. They will last forever.

Yes, you think. You are immortal, just like the dead gods who make up your flesh.

Immortality does not mean that you will live forever, but you leave that unsaid. You do not think that they will understand.

* * *

Your Name is Hecate, and you are a Goddess of Earth.

You have seen with your own eyes that even the arrogance of gods cannot hold off death.

It began slowly, as new Names came to describe those that you had known for centuries. Before long, their natures began to shift as their old worshipers died and their new grew in number.

You have seen with your own eyes that death comes in many forms.

You are unchanged, as of now — but for how much longer?

You cannot say, but you suspect it will not be long.

You have seen with your own eyes that even the arrogance of gods cannot hold off death, but you are arrogant enough that you will not let that stop you from trying.

If change is inevitable, best that it be a change of your own making. You will still be yourself for as long as your growth has not been forced upon you.

Change starts with a Name.

* * *

Your Name is Hecatia, and you are a Goddess of Earth.

You have begun to explore avenues for sustaining yourself without relying on worshipers, for their fickle nature has been fully exposed before your eyes. The most promising escape is Hell.

You hadn't understood before, but the word is at once a singular and a plural. There are countless Hells for the countless worlds, but in the end they are all the same for those few whose minds are capable of grasping their vastness.

Hell is a pure meritocracy, where Power is everything. The mightiest of its denizens may do whatever they wish to those weaker than them, may enforce their will in any way they choose. It is of the world, yet apart from it — and in its depths live deities unchanged from thousands of years past, deities who remain mighty despite having no worshipers at all.

They are the Gods of Hell, and they are omnipotent. None dare challenge them, and none may change them against their will.

The Gods of Hell have Freedom. You crave that.

You are not omnipotent. You remain mighty, but your strength is less than it was even a hundred years ago.

But you are made of the bones of dead gods, and there is no reason that you might not grow stronger by feasting on those still living.

Freedom is Power. Power is Freedom.

The nature of Power is that only one being can ever be truly Free, and you are determined that it will be you.

* * *

Your Name is Hecatia, and you are a Goddess of Hell.

It's a difficult title to earn, Goddess of Hell. It's a symbol of strength — possessing it names you as someone to be avoided by even the mightiest of foes, names you as an omnipotent pillar holding up the world. It gives you Freedom.

What you hadn't realized prior to using your teeth to tear the title from the guts of slain gods was that it was one thing to earn the title and another thing entirely to keep it.

Once you became a Goddess of Hell, legions that might have ignored you as a simple goddess in Hell decided that you were a worthy target and you found yourself beset by enemies on all sides. Many of them were Gods of Hell in their own right.

But you were omnipotent and they fell long before ever reaching you. Their power became your own.

It was only when the whispers started that you realized that 'omnipotent' was supposed to be an exaggeration, a vain claim by those with more Power than sense. You weren't supposed to be invincible, weren't supposed to be able to reshape every part of reality to your whim.

But why not? How could you be Free if there was anybody standing above you, free to enforce their will upon you? You find yourself disgusted with those who believe themselves worthy of being called Gods of Hell despite their weakness.

It is not long before you are the only holder of the title.

* * *

Your Name is Hecatia, and you are the Goddess of Hell.

Nobody else has dared attempt to take the title in many long years. You find yourself saddened by this.

Do they fear to try because you are omnipotent? You chose to seize the title even when you believed that the many who held it at the time possessed the kind of Power that you do now. Is the spirit of Freedom so weak even in Hell that its denizens would rather submit than risk their lives?

It is only a week after you begin to despair that you will never meet another true seeker of Freedom that a fairy attempts to kill you for buying the last scoop of vanilla ice cream from a terrified street vendor.

She's a fairy, and so her attempt is laughably incompetent. But that doesn't matter.

What matters is that she tried.

You kill her, of course. It's effortless.

She's after you again the next morning, and after a moment of staring you laugh so hard that tears flood from your eyes.

Fairies can't die. You are omnipotent, and if you wished it you could likely find a way to end her — but to do so would be to end a fundamental part of the world, whatever part it is from which she was birthed.

Fairies can't die. The troubles of omnipotent beings mean nothing to them. Power means nothing to them. They fear no threats, because they have short memories and shorter attention spans. By tomorrow, this fairy will have forgotten that she has twice attempted to kill you.

Fairies are weak. So weak that you can barely sense the Power in the fairy in front of you, even though she's impotently beating your chest with her tiny fists.

Fairies have Freedom, but not Power.

How could you have been so blind?

You sweep the fairy up and spin her through the air. You're still laughing, and it's only a moment before she joins in. She has already forgotten that she wanted you dead.

You Name her Clownpiece, and despite her weakness she has value beyond measure.

She is Free.

* * *

Your Name is Hecatia Lapislazuli, and you are a Goddess of Hell.

Not the only one, not anymore. You have understood your folly, and the denizens of Hell no longer fear you as greatly as they once did. They will never knowingly rouse your wrath, but they understand that you no longer take offense when the mighty wish to call themselves gods.

More than a Goddess of Hell, you are a Goddess of Freedom. Hell is a pure meritocracy, where Power is everything. The mightiest of its denizens may do whatever they wish to those weaker than them, may enforce their will in any way they choose.

You are the mightiest of its denizens, and you wish to protect the weak from those who would rule them with tyranny. Those who do not wish to take part in Hell's brutal politics, those who do not want their lives to be an unending spiral of fighting for Power so that they may live their own lives by continually fighting for Power, flock to you in droves. You make no claim to rule them, but you make it clear that they are Yours, and none dare touch them.

They are Free.

You have come a long way from the fool who believed that only one being could have true Freedom, who was willing to devour her kin to stand at the peak of the world.

You would regret it if you weren't certain that you would have been unable to learn the truth of Freedom if you had not first experienced its corrupted reflection.

The arrogance of gods saved you from death, but the humility learned from a fairy allowed you to live.

You have friends now. Even in the days when your pantheon reigned, there had never been any to whom you would have granted that title. Now you have many.

They are weak and they are Free, and you would not trade them for anything.

* * *

Your Name is Hecatia Lapislazuli, and you are a Goddess of the Moon.

You suppose it was inevitable that you would change in some small way, but the idea no longer frightens you as it once did. You are a Goddess of the Moon, but you are still a Goddess of Hell. You are even still a Goddess of Earth.

You are a goddess of every place that has a Hell, and that means you are a Goddess of Everywhere. For each of these places you have a body, though you are lazy enough that many of them do nothing but sleep.

But right now, you are a Goddess of the Moon first and foremost. You have been summoned by a desperate spirit, a woman who has lost everything to betrayal. She is more curse than life force, but you are omnipotent — the ill fortune she bears is no threat to you, and you welcome her into your life with open arms.

Clownpiece is immediately taken by her, and she proves adept at mothering the childish fairy in a way that you never quite mastered. She is able to debate you on matters great and small, and her black humor never fails to make you smile. You don't know why she decided that she wanted to move to Hell, but you don't pry. It doesn't matter.

Her Name is Junko, and you think you may be in love with her.

* * *

Your Name is Hecatia Lapislazuli, and you are a Goddess of the Moon.

That is the title that Junko needs you to bear, and so you do so with a heavy heart.

Junko, as it turned out, had begun cursing herself in order to destroy the one she blamed for her losses: Chang'e, a woman who stole her husband and caused her son to be murdered by that faithless man. Junko killed her husband and called your Name, knowing that she could not slay the source of her pain as she was then — Chang'e had been imprisoned by the people of the Moon for the crime of gaining immortality. She needed a place to grow stronger, and you provided that.

You don't know if that's the whole story, but you don't really care. This Chang'e is Junko's enemy, and that's enough to make her yours.

But Junko is a spirit of vengeance now, and if you told her that you were willing to help her out of love she would not understand. She is already beginning to lose her memories, purifying herself of everything that she once was so that she can become a true embodiment of curses.

And so you tell her that her husband once shot down one of the suns of Hell, and you are willing to avenge the crime on his wife now that he is dead. She accepts this without question, and seems glad to have you on her side.

Your heart aches.

You are omnipotent. There is no enemy you cannot slay for Junko, should she ask it — but she wishes to take this vengeance with her own two hands, and to achieve it she must die.

You are omnipotent. You can protect Junko from any enemy.

Any enemy except her own Freedom, which you will not take from her even if it takes her from you.

You love her.

* * *

Your Name is Hecatia Lapislazuli, and you are a Goddess of the Moon.

Together with Junko and Clownpiece, you have finalized a plan to allow Junko the chance to avenge herself not just on Chang'e, but on all of the people of the Moon who sat back and allowed the tragedy of her life to occur. It is an audacious plan, using the weakness and Freedom of fairies to lock down the power of the many gods of the Moon.

You could wipe them away as easily as you can blink, but that is not Junko's wish, and so you prepare for a siege.

The night before your plan is to commence, Junko comes to you.

"Thank you, Hecatia," she says.

When you ask why she is saying this now, before her vengeance has come to fruition, she tells you that she wished to say it while she could still remember your name.

No tears fall from the face of the body to which she spoke those words.

None are left for it to cry, as your countless other bodies are already producing enough tears to fill eight thousand oceans.

* * *

Your Name is Hecatia Lapislazuli, and you are a Goddess of Freedom.

Junko has declared the plan a failure.

The fairies drove the people of the Moon to seek refuge in the Dream World, leading them to flee right into the sealed zone that you prepared as a trap. Everything was executed perfectly.

But a human from a small, hidden land on the Earth interfered and defeated Junko in battle, and Junko has declared the plan a failure. She has asked you to release the people of the Moon from their captivity.

You look down at the human, so frail yet so determined. Her eyes burn with passion as she tells you how the people of the Moon planned to attempt to escape from your trap by destroying the precious land in which she lived, taking it for themselves.

You are omnipotent. Their plan would have been a failure, and yet you cannot help but feel rage. They would have tried to wipe out a place that produced humans this wonderful? Humans who were willing to stare into the face of an omnipotent goddess and demand she do as they asked for the sake of those they loved?

For the first time, you have a personal desire to kill them. But that is not what the human wants, and it is not what Junko has asked you to do — Junko who still remembers your name, because this human defeated her before she finished purifying herself.

Junko who is still alive.

You owe this human everything, and so you allow her to defeat an omnipotent goddess to save her loved ones. You free the people of the Moon, and you make it clear to the gods of every world that the human's homeland is under your protection.

When you ask Junko whether she is fine with having failed to take her revenge, she smiles sweetly and tells you that there is always next time.

When you ask when that will be, she places a kiss on the corner of your mouth and tells you that it may be quite some time from now. She has a new family, she says, and she does not want to throw it away so carelessly.

That human taught her that, she says. That human and her companions, including a rabbit who cast away the Moon and became a rabbit of the Earth.

With a smile on her face, Junko tells you that she does not plan to be less capable of moving on with her life than a rabbit. She can find ways to get her revenge that don't require her to lose everything.

You suggest a postcard. Chang'e is a prisoner, and surely the best way to get revenge is to show her that Junko is Free and happy.

Junko laughs and laughs, and within the year you find yourself delivering a postcard to a prisoner.

On the front of the postcard is a photograph of yourself and Junko, radiant on the day of your wedding. Clownpiece is there, too, her hair full of petals from her enthusiastic embrace of the role of flower girl.

On the back is a simple message:

"I am Free."


End file.
